Restoring the Aboriginal Voice: Language and Identity in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

This paper examines how Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith engages with the restoration of Aboriginal voice and identity within the context of Australian colonial discourse. Specifically, the novel addresses the historical silencing of Aboriginal people and highlights the tension between imposed European language and enduring Aboriginal oral traditions. The central objective of this study is to explore how linguistic hybridity—particularly Aboriginal English and ceremonial chanting—functions as a tool of identity assertion and resistance against colonial authority. Employing close textual analysis informed by postcolonial theory, the paper draws on Said's concept of colonial discourse, Bhabha's notion of hybridity, and Ashcroft's idea of linguistic resistance. This analysis demonstrates how Aboriginal English, with its hybridised grammar and vocabulary, alongside chants rooted in kinship and cultural memory, operate subversively within the English novel form. Furthermore, the study situates Keneally's novel alongside Indigenous-authored works such as Alexis Wright's Carpentaria and Kim Scott's Benang: From the Heart. This comparative perspective underscores both the contributions and the limits of settler-authored attempts to “restore” Aboriginal voice, contrasting them with Indigenous narrative sovereignty that reconstitutes English from within Aboriginal epistemologies. The findings conclude that while Keneally's novel functions as a counter-narrative that unsettles colonial silencing, its mediation through settler authorship leaves it marked by ambivalence. Ultimately, the enduring reclamation of Aboriginal voice and identity in literature is most powerfully enacted in Indigenous-authored narratives, which reshape language, memory, and representation on their own terms. Highlights: Aboriginal voice restoration (it examines how The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith restores Aboriginal voice and identity within Australian colonial discourse). Linguistic hybridity (it demonstrates how linguistic hybridity functions as a means of survival, identity assertion). Counter-narrative discourse (it argues that the novel operates as a counter-narrative, asserting Aboriginal agency and reframing dominant historical accounts).